Equinox - Diane Carey [1]
Moving very slowly, Max Burke brought his tricorder around. "I dunno ... but I'm going to eat it anyway ..." The tricorder bleeped softly.
The alien form flittered with what might be electrical energy-might not.
"Not a spirit," the first officer finally concluded. "Nucleogenic matter... no-antimatter! High levels radiating right now."
"Now? In the same physical space with matter?" Ransom asked.
Burke shook his head at what he was reading. He had no answer. Here they were, and there it was.
"Life form?" he pressed. "Not an illusion?"
"Seems to be some kind of life," was all Burke would say.
Swirling merrily through the air around them now, the liquid animal danced like an ocean wave come inland for a visit, then lost dimension and slipped back into its scalpel cut.
The rift healed clean.
In his stomach Ransom's unidentified dinner crawled
around as if he'd forgotten to chew it. At his side Burke reviewed the graceful visitation on his tricorder screen, running analysis after analysis, his black brows flaring higher with every pass.
The Ankari hosts rocked with pleasure. They were proud of themselves for the show. Ritual, whatever.
Ransom cleared his throat. "You thank," he managed. "Pretty."
"Bless pretty voyage," one of them said. "Bless ship Equinox."
"You thank," he said again. When the two aliens got up and moved away, apparently satisfied that they'd been hospitable, Ransom kept an eye on them but spoke to Burke. "Max... what've you got? Brainwaves? Language? Anything?"
"It... I don't... does this make sense?" Burke showed him the tricorder readings. "If we could hang on to this for a few minutes ... think of it! Look at the enhancement!"
"Shh," Ransom halted. "Let's do this by the book."
"We left the book in the Alpha Quadrant! Rudy, if we could contain this, the power flux-"
"Shh. Give me a chance to talk to our friends. Keep the crew working. Get that stuff loaded. Let me just talk to them..."
"It's inside!"
Over the single-toned whine made by the Ankari cylinder, Maria Gilmore's triumphant cry buzzed fiercely through the research lab aboard U.S.S. Equinox. Her thick blond hair fell forward over her
shoulder as she leaned closer to the containment chamber's controls.
The lab was small, dim, and damaged, still stinking of fried electricals from the last time they'd had to fight their way out. Ransom worried that he was getting too used to that stink. If this worked, the cozy old ship would get a heck of a cleanup.
At first the fluid-creature was passive, exploring the multiphasic containment chamber Gilmore had built. It seemed curious, moving around it in a looping circle to every side, every corner.
Nearby, Max Burke furiously fed readings into the engineering link computer and the med link. The med link showed no change, but the engineering link flashed and its readings sped too fast to follow. That was one happy computer.
If Captain Ransom had entertained any doubt that the swimmer was indeed alive, that dissolved in a sudden screech. It realized it was trapped inside the containment chamber. Its green skin darkened to blue, and it began to thrash from side to side, up and down, screaming louder.
Burke's voice cracked as the containment field spiked. "Something's wrong."
"Rudy!" Maria Gilmore backed away from the chamber, horrified.
The creature's cranial membrane parted just as the fissure doorway had. Terrible features broke through the egg-yolk membrane, hideous features recognizable anywhere in the universe as threatening. As they watched, breathless, the creature imitated everything
from horns to fangs to feathers as it splashed around the inside of the chamber.
"Get it out of there," Ransom ordered.
Burke's whitened hands worked on the controls. The alien cylinder's colors washed, but nothing happened to free the creature trapped inside the chamber.
Its screaming got louder, its thrashing more desperate.
"Send it back!" he shouted over the maddening whine.
"We can't..." But Burke worked faster, his desperation